NSA surveillance ‘deep throat’ Snowden does vanishing act

Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who made this week's biggest story worldwide by revealing himself as the source of top-secret leaks about US surveillance programmes, has just as quickly gone to ground again (See: Whistleblower behind leak on US government phone snooping, Edward Snowden goes public).

Two days after he checked out of a Hong Kong hotel where he told London's The Guardian newspaper that he had "no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," Edward Snowden was nowhere to be found today, despite being the central figure in the biggest news story in the world.

According to The Guardian, which worked with Snowden to first break the story, he is believed to be staying in a "safe house".

The 29-year-old Snowden checked out of his Hong Kong hotel room Monday as journalists in the city began to figure out where he was staying from a video interview published online the day before, paper said.

"It is thought he is now in a safe house," wrote Ewen MacAskill, one of the newspaper's journalists who helped develop articles from the information Snowden leaked. The report didn't specify where the safe house was.

Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who also interviewed Snowden in Hong Kong, has given a series of interviews about the case, but refused to reveal any information about Snowden's location or his future plans.

As Snowden tries to stay out of the spotlight, US authorities are preparing charges against him, a law enforcement source told CNN on Tuesday. But the charges are not imminent, the source said.

And the first civil lawsuits were filed against federal officials, arguing that the surveillance programmes are unconstitutional.

Snowden, a former computer security contractor, acknowledged in a Guardian interview that he gave journalists classified documents about US surveillance of telephone and internet traffic.

Snowden told The Guardian that he expects to be charged under the Espionage Act and said he travelled to Hong Kong in hopes that state's commitment to free speech would prevent his extradition to the United States.

Legal experts say that Hong Kong's bilateral treaties with the United States may make it hard for Snowden to avoid eventually being sent back from the semiautonomous Chinese territory. But some have suggested that any court battle to extradite him could be very drawn out.

With little new information to report on Snowden or his whereabouts, Hong Kong's newspapers as well as others around the world fixated on his American girlfriend, a dancer who posted partially nude photographs on herself online before she also apparently disappeared.

"Spy on the run: girlfriend ill at ease," read one Apple Daily headline above a picture of the 28-year-old Lindsay Mills in a provocative pose taken from her blog, which has since gone offline.

Mills is not believed to be travelling with Snowden, who is thought to still be in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong supporters of the 29-year-old American have organised a protest march featuring local human rights activists and prominent pro-democracy politicians to pass in front of the US Consulate on Saturday afternoon.

Snowden arrived in Hong Kong from his home in Hawaii on 20 May, just after taking leave from his National Security Agency contracting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which has since fired him.

Questions remain about why Snowden chose to go public in Hong Kong, a Chinese autonomous region that maintains a Western-style legal system and freedom of speech, although he said he considered the territory to be relatively free and open.

Hong Kong's extradition agreement with the United States has exceptions in cases of political persecution or where there are concerns over cruel or humiliating treatment.